GMTK Jam 2025: Flappy Birdlynn

I participated in GMTK Jam 2025! The theme was "Loop", so we made a game about drawing loops and going fast, and it's available on web! https://connery0.itch.io/flappy-birdlynn by @connery0, @shadouette, and I (@flashkirby)

Also shout out to some friends we were jamming with who also submitted games:

Plan-Et, a game about angels making orbits, by @w1k and @suweeka
https://w1k.itch.io/plan-et

Clip Crab, a game about the endless scrolling of social media, by @ppowersteef 
https://ppowersteef.itch.io/clip-crab

Our entry was inspired by a number of different "draw" based games. Among the list were games like Kirby Canvas Curse / Power Paintbrush and Line Rider as a movement mechanic, and the classic game about drawing loops, Pokemon Ranger.  

Hot off the back of art fight, while this jam took place from wednesday to Sunday (4 days), both Shadou and I were actually pretty busy that week already so we took a relay approach where we brainstormed on the Wednesday evening, after which Connery0 started developing prototypes until we settled on a something fun.

We knew we were onto something on thursday when Con had a little sandbox for flying around in and we spent several minutes just drawing loops and engaging in general line-based tomfoolery. 

While the actual core mechanics were being worked on I was working on the Miro board, planning some ideas for the game screen and levels so we could implement them as soon as the code base was stable, and to give Shadou a better idea of what kind of art assets we might need.

 

By friday Con had already made a skeleton of the game, and on saturday I joined in with dev, implementing my terrain assets and animating Shadou's character art, fixing some minor bugs while Con starting building out the levels. 

With only 6 hours to go on sunday, we started giving the game a bit of polish - I went over and added some extra VFX and decorated the levels while Con got to work doing last minute tweaks and checks, adding in the last bits of Shadou's illustrations to the menu and preparing our submission entry page. I'm quite proud of the hopping Birdlynn does to navigate to a nearby loop, and the little speed boost animation.

And on 2025-08-03 16:38:00 UTC, we had built and submitted our jam entry!

My overall takeaways:

• Having the itch page set up early, with a butler script for uploading, meant that we didn't have as much to worry about closer to the deadline when itch.io inevitably went down and had an hour extension for submissions.
• Hot Reload for Unity is an incredible time save for both edit and play mode, with the usual limitations of needing a recompile when working with new variables... but having the option to delay this if you don't need them right away in the editor!
• Building for web is very slow. The final web build took ~12 minutes compared to ~2 minutes for the windows build.
• Having a collaborative board to visualise and work through how a game will look helped a lot with getting other members of the team participating - through level design, asset scope, and general screen navigation - well before any of these are implemented technically.
• The moment that clicked was when we had sketches on the board showing what the game screen would look like, featuring all the core elements, eg. player, level, goal, ui, and the size of all these elements together. 
• Deciding on a basic narrative helped everyone in aligning mechanical and artistic themes together - once we decided that our circles and lines game was a bird riding the wind, it was much easier to theme everything else around that.